Media

Cinema Purgatorio

A threatened species, film critics have been bemoaning lost jobs and vanishing outlets. Andrew O'Hehir's Salon smackdown of his colleagues fuels a debate over whether professional movie reviewing should exist at all.

Over at the Web magazine Salon, whose very name evokes civilized discourse to the elegant slurp of tea and sherry, the dome of contributor Andrew O’Hehir’s head indecorously exploded, releasing a roaring cloud of ash, smoke, hellfire, and exasperation. O’Hehir had had his fill—a man can only take so much. So what made his ceiling blow?

The incessant whining of his fellow film critics as they find themselves jobless and journalistically homeless, picked off one by one and tossed on the out-pile, sacrificial offerings to the bottom line. It’s not as if their whining were over nothing. There has been a drastic kill-off in the screening-room ranks during the Great Recession, which has proven to be not a typical, cyclical downturn but a profound reordering of the media universe—the cannibalizing of traditional print by digital. O’Hehir himself cites a casualty list of disemployed film critics compiled by Salt Lake Tribune blogger Sean P. Means, whose tally had reached 65 names and may have risen since. Some of the names were notable, such as those of Andrew Sarris, one of the last living pillars of American film criticism’s halcyon age (along with The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann), shown the exit door at The New York Observer; Todd McCarthy, let go after three decades at Variety; David Ansen, who accepted a buyout from Newsweek; Mike Clark, cast overboard from USA Today; and—but why dirge on? You get the grim picture, which is no brighter on TV, where A. O. Scott of The New York Times and Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, the caretakers of the Roger Ebert—Gene Siskel At the Movies franchise, became its undertakers after Disney yanked its life support. Even those who would appear to be sitting pretty, such as The New Yorker’s tag team of David Denby and Anthony Lane, have seen their reviews tucked within a tighter frame, there no longer being ad-supported room for the arias and crescendos Pauline Kael once performed. Rather than slump off into the wings like Willy Loman lugging the last pair of suitcases, film critics have taken to print and the Web to lament their fate and the hospice condition of film criticism, and it was on this pity party that O’Hehir histrionically peed.

“If film criticism really is dying, it’s doing so with all the dignity of a bunch of clucking old hens, squawking in despair while the fox gnaws his way through the wire,” O’Hehir began. “I myself have participated in three panel discussions in the last three years about the dire plight of people who get paid to write about movies other people make—attended primarily if not exclusively by other critics or aspiring critics—and there must have been dozens more.” O’Hehir tours the Wailing Wall of eulogies and elegies to the art and craft of criticism, from Boston Phoenix columnist Gerald Peary’s documentary, For the Love of Movies, to A. O. Scott’s “threnody” in The New York Times, which O’Hehir has the temerity (I’m all for temerity) to call “gasbaggy”—practically an act of lèse-majesté in the criticsphere, akin to telling The New Yorker’s James Wood to put a sock in it. All of this provided the warm-up for O’Hehir’s snap-out-of-it slap of tough love across the chops:

I will offer some unsolicited advice to my fellow critics all around the world: Shut up. Shut up now. Shut the fuck up and get back to work. If you’re worried that people don’t want to read your movie reviews, what in the name of Jesus Christ crucified makes you think they want to read your bitching and moaning? All this stuff is doing, at least at this point, is creating opportunities for feel-bad encounters with other anguished critics and drive-by trolls, and making you look like a bunch of ginormous great babies.

Oh my. As you might imagine, those who have lost jobs and income didn’t appreciate being called blubberers by somebody who has a job, a regular byline, and an expanding bailiwick (“With the departure of my dear friend Stephanie Zacharek for her new gig at Movieline, I will once again take on a larger role in reviewing movies for Salon”). Nor did the irony of a columnist who expresses opinions for a living castigating colleagues for expressing theirs go unremarked. Telling writers to shut up is a sure way to keep them talking. Glenn Kenny, a former editor and writer at Premiere magazine, smashed O’Hehir’s gag order back over the net, declaring at his outpost, Some Came Running, “As long as I’m the guy paying the annual Typepad fee to maintain this blog, I’ll write about whatever the fuck I want. (Emphasis mine.)” Others, however, echoed O’Hehir’s compassion fatigue and went further, wondering how professional film critics had avoided the gangplank as long as they did. Their utility was always dubious, averred Tom Shone, a former movie reviewer at the London Sunday Times and the author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer. He argued on his blog, Taking Barack to the Movies, that insular, circular group-think had cut off the airflow in critics’ sensibilities, widening the gap between them and popular taste and marooning them on Zombie Island. “I think… film critics are blazingly out of sync with the vast majority of filmgoers—just look at the praise heaped on movies like Duplicity, Up in the Air, A Serious Man and Greenberg, all clever, sometimes witty, thematically rich movies with no discernible pulse. In fact, with 75% of film critics giving Greenberg an enthusiastic thumbs up, it might be argued that it’s high time film critics went extinct.” That’s a heavy rap to put on Greenberg, even if it was directed by Noah Baumbach, the perpetrator of that bouquet of poison ivy, Margot at the Wedding.

When it came to raining on the funeral march, no one outdid *Time’*s Richard Schickel, sourpuss supreme. Appearing on a panel to discuss Peary’s documentary, Schickel dripped dyspepsia over everyone’s pretty little idealisms. “Watching all these kind of earnest people discussing the art or whatever the hell it is of criticism, all that, it just made me so sad. You mean they have nothing else to do?” asked Schickel before adding, “I don’t know honestly the function of reviewing anything.” And if reviewing movies now struck him as a loser pastime, reading reviews was an even deeper waste of time. According to Stephen Saito’s eyewitness account at the IFC blog, “When asked by [panel moderator Anne] Thompson if he ever read criticism online, Schickel gave a forceful ‘no,’ before explaining ‘Why would you do that? I’m not going to go around looking for Harry Knowles [the portly Ain’t It Cool News founder who is featured in the documentary]. I mean look at that person! Why would anybody just looking at him pay the slightest attention to anything he said?!? He’s a gross human being.’” Schickel’s curmudgeonly performance inspired a mock Richard Schickel Twitter feed, where the fake Schickel is given to tweets such as “We didn’t call it ‘blogging’ in my day. We called it writing on toilet walls.”

I find myself wavering somewhere between the mourning party and the forward-ho pragmatists. Nostalgia-averse as I am, I confess a pang for the post—Bonnie and Clyde glory run in movie criticism when Kael, Sarris, John Simon, Rex Reed, Judith Crist, Vincent Canby, the influx of flashy ingénues from Boston’s alternative weeklies (Janet Maslin, Stephen Schiff, Owen Gleiberman, and David Edelstein, among others), and the solitary warblers in the lonesome pines of the intellectual journals (William S. Pechter in Commentary, Vernon Young in The Hudson Review) traded illumination rounds across the contested terrain of A Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs, Dirty Harry, Nashville, Manhattan, and even Neil Simon’s comedies, with their player-piano jollity. Everyone was on high alert, ready to kung fu. I miss those days, but they’re not coming back, any more than the doors of CBGB’s will open to reveal the Ramones onstage, firing three-chord fusillades. What’s happening to movie critics is no different from what has been meted out to book, dance, theater, and fine-arts reviewers and reporters in the cultural deforestation that has driven refugees into the diffuse clatter of the Internet and Twitter, where some adapt and thrive—such as Roger Ebert—while others disappear without a twinkle.

In a recent blog post, Ebert counseled against dark despair and declared that this was the golden age, lit by a thousand points of light. The front lines of criticism may have dissolved, but a fresh multitude of voices have arisen, many of them inspired specialists in film noir, horror, anime, and pre-Code Hollywood. “What the internet is creating is a class of literate, gifted amateur writers, in an old tradition,” he wrote. “A blog on the internet gives them a place to publish. Maybe they don’t get a lot of visits, but it’s out there. As a young woman in San Francisco, Pauline Kael wrote the notes for screenings of great films, and did a little free-lancing. If she’d had a blog, no telling what she might have written during those years.” The print emigrants and upstart originals may not be addressing a general audience, but there’s no longer a general audience to address. They went thataways.